Good ideas to fix our Fed Budget Mess

Found the attached a well reasoned list of steps to take to restore some fiscal sanity to our nation's financial situation.

How to Balance the Budget Without Raising Taxes

The 19 Percent Solution

Nick Gillespie & Veronique de Rugy | December 5, 2010

A value-added tax, a soda tax, a gas tax, banning earmarks, freezing a portion of federal spending at "pre-stimulus" levels - there’s no shortage of ideas being thrown out to fix the country’s disastrous balance sheet, which threatens not just near-term economic recovery but the possibility of long-term growth. Like last week's report from the president's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, most of the current plans to fix the country's finances rely more on increases in revenues than on cuts in spending. In part due to its heavy reliance on revenue hikes, the commission, charged with balancing the budget by 2020, failed to win enough votes of its own members to present its recommendations to Congress.

Which raises the question: Can America really reduce its debt and deficit without raising taxes to job-killing rates or cutting essential services to developing-world levels? The answer is not simply yes, it's that we have to.

Raising government revenue - taxes - substantially is not only bad policy, it has proven difficult and ultimately unsustainable for any length of time in the past 60 years. Since 1950, annual government revenue, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has averaged just below 18 percent despite every attempt to jack it up or tamp it down. Our post-World War II experience shows that if the government is going to live within its means, it can't spend much more than 18 percent of GDP. Period.

Which is one reason to be happy that the debt commission's recommendations won't be presented to Congress anytime soon. The report assumes revenue equal to 21 percent of GDP and struggles to get spending to "below 22% and eventually to 21%" of GDP. That’s a recipe for disaster that would guarantee deficits and red ink.

Similarly, former Sens. Bill Bradley, John Danforth, and Gary Hart, working with the Committee for a Responsible Budget, have offered up a plan to balance the budget by 2020 that relies on revenue hitting 20.8 percent of GDP, a level that hasn't been achieved once in the past 60 years. Republicans have not advanced any realistic near-term plans. Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) Roadmap to the American Future does not balance the budget until 2063. The pre-election GOP’s Pledge to America is worthless since it fails to provide specifics (and to the extent it does, it is no good). Read more.

The right way to reduce taxes

To Reduce Taxes, We Must Abolish Our Tax Breaks

by John Tamny, Toreador Research and Trading (VE Guest Contributor)

After preparing my taxes last year, my accountant noticed my horror and responded that “You’re not playing the game right. Buy a house with a large mortgage, have children, or do something that’s deductible to reduce your tax bill.” The accountant’s words were true, and a shining example of a wealth transfer that’s not spoken of enough.

We hear all the time about how basic income taxes, government spending and inflation are redistributive in nature, but not mentioned enough is how both political parties use the tax code to redistribute wealth to favored constituents or individuals who live as Washington would like them to. Those who don’t play the game are essentially fleeced so that those who do can enjoy a lower tax bill. Full story here

The Year The "Media Died"

A classic from Terry Kawaja

How The Fed Spends Our Dollars

In case you're wondering the six (6) segments are:

1. Social Security
2. DoD
3. Unemployment / Welfare
4. Medicare
5. Medicade
6. Interest on the Nat'l Debt (first orange section)

Easy to see where the cuts need to be made.

Data Content '10, Philadelphia, PA Oct 26-27

http://www.infocommercegroup.com/conference/

I'll be on a panel discussion next month talking about new revenue opportunities for those firms employing online ad rev / lead gen business models.

Seven Things to RE-THINK to help launch new ideas

We've all experienced the frustration of a great idea - or at least we thought so - that went no where on your team, firm or even family. The following includes a good check-lick of things to "re-think". Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is " ... doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different [better] result."

Below are the Seven (7) items from the "Leading Blog" to rethink.

1. Re-think complexity. We create complexity by over-analyzing our situation; creating issues where there are none; forgetting our purpose. Complexity obscures the issues. Keep the issues as uncluttered as possible.

2. Re-think systems. Tenaciously grasping the old ways of doing things just because that is what you have always done, can stop the flow of ideas and innovative solutions and lead to hopelessness.

3. Re-think ego. Our ego frequently keeps us from exploring new ideas. We keep retrying to work the old and deceive ourselves into thinking we’re making progress when all we are doing is rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

4. Re-think boundaries. Think bigger. Think interdisciplinary. Growth often involves blurring boundaries to open your mind to new possibilities.

5. Re-think reactions. Repetitive reactions are the result of ingrained patterns of thinking that we have hard-wired into our brains long ago.

6. Re-think failure. If you’re afraid of being wrong, embarrassed by failure or paralyzed by insecurity, you will never find the solutions that lead to meaningful growth. Failure provides the nutrients for growth when we respond to them positively.

7. Re-think success. Know what success looks like. How will you know when you have arrived? Muddy expectations lead to exhaustion and defeat before you even get started.

10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly

Brian Taylor

Enlarge Image

By Michael C. Munger

Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing.

In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn't, or didn't, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write.

What I have tried to produce below are 10 tips on scholarly nonfiction writing that might help people write less badly. Here's the list of 10 tips.

Digital vs Traditional Media: a solid read from Greg Satell

"An Industry at War with Itself

Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The digital world is a collection of unhappy families, mostly because everybody is confused. With some many ideas flying around and so much money at stake, who wouldn’t be?

Problems are poorly defined and solutions are untested. Technologists want to build cool stuff, marketers look to fill consumer needs and finance people want to see a profit. Who’s right? Well, companies that lose money on lousy products that nobody wants don’t last very long. People with different perspectives and varied skill sets need to learn to work together,

Having spent ample time in both digital and traditional media, I find the digital world no less myopic, but far less integrated than established industries. I would suspect that the companies that will survive are the ones that manage to find a common purpose long after the high growth phase has extinguished itself."

Check out the rest of Greg Satell's solid read on Digital Tonto.

Here's what is really wrong with the American economy...

40 Years to get Baptized

Last Sunday (8/8), almost 40 years to the week I accepted Christ as my Lord and savior as a 12 year old at Good Tidings Bible Conference I was finally baptized; old school style. Dunked in the bath - under water - almost took the pastor under with me. I'm grateful that my Mom, Dad and wife Julie were in attendance. I see this as an ordnance and not a ritual for my salvation is based on my faith through God's grace alone.

Randy Fishkin's view's on linkbuilding: a worthy read

Greg Suhey provided a nice summary of Randy Fishkin's (photo) "out of the box" views at PubCon last fall on link building as a part of your overall SEO strategy. It is always about good content.

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"Believe it or not, Google employs a team dedicated to searching for webspam. They invest lots of time and resources into finding and shutting down effective paid linking opportunities. This is the number one reason why you should never participate in paid links. Once Google finds you, you are done!

Paid links are paid links. They cost money! Rand hit on some better ways to invest your money in other avenues that will help you acquire links in a more natural manner. Here is what he said to do:

1. Spend the money necessary to increase your webpage load speed. This will decrease your bounce rate, make your visitors much happier, and possibly cause them to link to your content.

2. Invest in user generated content and contributions. Spending money to create content that will be on the internet for years is a much better way to go than purchasing or “renting” links.

3. Hire community managers. Managing your place in the online community can definitely help you obtain links back to your website. Providing your customers visibility into your business wherever they are is the best way to get traffic and drive links to your site.

4. Organize and sponsor events. At SEO.com, we organize workshops for the local community that help us get links all over the internet. Rand and the SEOmoz team organized and sponsored a party on Wednesday evening. That party got a lot of attention and links back to the party page on their website. This can be a very effective way to get a lot of really good, natural links.

5. License content or technology for nominal fees (free if possible). Making something of worth available to your customers to either purchase or obtain for free can be a great way of getting links and promotion to your cause.

6. Issue press releases. We do this for many of our clients. Press releases are a great way to generate buzz about your business and get links back to your website, if you have something newsworthy.

7. Collect research data and share it with others. If you have collected truly valuable research data and you share that data for free, you can expect a lot of links coming back to your site.

8. Take some time to look at optimizing the link targeted content from a conversion standpoint.

9. Advertise link targeted content. It isn’t a sin to purchase links to advertise your link targeted content. You are trying to get the word out about what you are trying to offer or share with others. You aren’t trying to get rankings for that page with the purchased links.

These are most of the things that Rand spoke about. They are all really good ways to think outside the box and spend money on efforts that will bring natural links back to your website.

In closing, it is important to remember why we don’t want to participate in paid links. When you take a look at link acquisition speed, natural links grow organically or naturally. The number of links you acquire can and will fluctuate each month.

Not only that, natural links have less targeted anchor text, unlike paid links. You definitely don’t want all of your links to have the anchor text of your main keyword.

As with everything you do for your SEO campaign, you should always think twice when considering any gray or black hat tactics. Keep in mind that it is much more difficult to make your efforts look natural when you participate in anything Google looks down upon. When Google sees red flags, which they will, you are toast!"

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To Micro Site or Not Micro Site - Vanessa has an answer

As a long time fan of Vanessa Fox's work, and her book (above) I found her thoughtful summary (below) of Six (6) reasons why its good to avoid a microsite strategy insightful. Below are some highlights.

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1. You lose brand identity and audience engagement

You spend significant corporate energy on positive brand perception and awareness. And then you start over completely from scratch with an entirely new brand. Woo? If you are reaching an entirely different audience and your current brand would be confusing, then you may in fact want to build out a new brand, but that case, you probably won’t be launching a microsite, you’ll launch a full site. In most cases, microsites are subsets of or promotions for the main site, with exactly the same audience. Do you really want to work at building up multiple brand identities? And do you really not want to benefit from the brand building in one category for another related category? (This comes especially important with ecommerce sites, such as those drugstore.com operates. Even today, we don’t want to hand over our credit card information to just any site.)

Brand awareness has a search impact as well. As I note in the searcher behavior chapter of my book, searchers quickly evaluate the search results page to determine which result to click on. Many things go into that evaluation, but certainly brand recognition helps in evaluating credibility and perceived value.

2. You lose the ability to leverage your audience

Let’s say you launch an awesome site with a fantastic user experience, great products, and unrivaled customer support. For instance, let’s say you’re Zappos. Someone writes up a positive article about you in say, the NY Times. Readers start clicking over to your site. They see you sell running shoes. They just read about how great you are, so they feel confident about purchasing some products from your site. But maybe those same readers also need some clothes to go running in. If you had a separate runningclothes.com microsite, you’ve just missed a great opportunity to reach a targeted and motivated audience.

3. You confuse people and search engines

Oh, I won’t have that whole NY Times reader problem, you say. I’ll just keep a complete copy of my runningclothes.com content on my main site too! That way, I can reach the audience for my main site as well as get all the additional audience potential of the microsite. Oh really? First, that’s just confusing. If someone becomes accustomed to shopping for athletic clothes on your main site and then clicking over for shoes, but then one day they end up on runningclothes.com and everything looks the same… and yet the shoes are gone — that’s just not the experience you want to give users. read more...

4. You may have to spend substantial additional resources

The microsites run by drugstore.com all use the same template and content management system. So it seems like low engineering overhead to maintain them all. But wait. As you build out the content of both sites, you have to decide which content to put where. And decide how to spend marketing, PR, and advertising resources. When you issue a press release, which site do you talk up? All of them? What if you have 20? And you likely are doing social media. Do you now maintain 20 Facebook pages and 20 Twitter accounts? I’m tired just thinking about it. Read more...

5. You cobble your search acquisition efforts

A big part of ranking well in search engines continues to be the strength of the external links to the site. If you maintain multiple sites, then you are diluting that external link value. If five people link to your main site and five people link to your microsite, each site is competing for rankings against the rest of the web with those five links. Instead, you could have one site competing with ten links. Anything that you do for offsite search engine optimization, you have to repeat for each site.

6. It can be difficult to match promotions to search visiblity

One common case of microsites is when a company launches a new promotion. It seems to make perfect sense to launch a microsite as part of that promotion. You can tie branding to the promo and it can be a lot easier to outsource the development of the site to the agency that is managing the promotion creative than to try to coordinate in-house resources and add a section about the promotion to the main company website. Read more...

The "great deception"

Having the right info is important; a worthwhile commentary from Charles Stanley.

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The Rich Young Ruler

Luke 18:18-23

"Three of the four gospels contain an account of the young man who asked Jesus a very important question: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (v. 18). A ruler with great wealth, he considered himself a moral man because he had kept God's commandments.

However, he was operating under the false assumption that good works bring salvation. He seemed to be asking Jesus what else he had to do to secure his place in heaven--besides all the good things he'd already accomplished.

This is what I refer to as the "great deception"--the false belief that eternal life can be earned through our own efforts. If we give credence to this lie, then we do not understand the problem of our sin and how it separates us from God. Scripture tells us that we have inherited a sinful nature from the first man (Rom. 5:12). Ever since that time, humanity has been in rebellion against the Lord and under His judgment. There is nothing we can do to pay for our sin. If this were the end of the story, we would be a people without hope for today or the future. But the good news is that the heavenly Father recognized our plight and mercifully provided the way to heaven (John 14:6).

When God made us in His image, He created us to live forever. So, though our earthly body will perish, our spirit will never die. The question about eternal life is important, as we'll spend eternity either with God in heaven or in an insufferable state, separated permanently from Him (Matt. 25:34, 41). "

10 Tips for Creating a Successful Content Marketing Campaign

A great check list from Brian Rice to make sure your content driven marketing plan is on track.

1. Create a content marketing plan that includes a SEO plan, Content Plan and Performance Plan.
2. Research using free tools such as Compete and WordVision.
3. Use competitive intelligence to pinpoint opportunity.
4. Drive search engine success through your SEO plan.
5. Prioritize keywords to drive your SEO goals. Tip: target a combination of 1/3 keywords that you rank in the top 50 of the search listings, 1/3 keywords that you rank 51 – 100 and 1/3 keywords that you rank 100+.
6. Create category maps that include the topic, primary keywords and secondary keywords to make SEO writing easier for your staff.
7. Expand your content asset portfolio.
8. Listen to the conversation happening on the various social media channels.
9. Track your SEO rankings. Tip: you can also measure success by evaluating your website traffic, repeat visitors, time on site, conversion rates, content lead generation and content lead conversions.
10. Tag your content publishing dates.

Focus on your employees and success will follow.

John Battelle interviewed Tony Hsieh (pix below) of Zappos this week at Federated Media Publishing's CM Summit in NYC and one of the key take aways for me re: their success was his (Tony's) focus on corp culture and caring for his employees. Below is a quote from an article in Inc that he basically repeated in the interview. Additionally, the article is also a fascinating read on how selling Zappos actually enabled it to thrive and grow.

Tony Hsieh's approach to dealing with employees is remarkable and his business has flourished in a most competitive market sector, women's shoes. Check out his book to learn how to create a culture that enables a business to thrive and grow. "Delivering Happiness"

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"Zappos sells shoes and apparel online, but what distinguished us from our competitors was that we'd put our company culture above all else. We'd bet that by being good to our employees -- for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center -- we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. Better service would translate into lots of repeat customers, which would mean low marketing expenses, long-term profits, and fast growth."

From Inc Magazine, June 1, 2010

Zappos is now a $1B/year company for Amazon. Tony was right.

10 Metrics to measure for B2B Social Media

The info below is from The Social Times; cool blog I like to read with some timely insights.

According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

a, Visitors and sources of traffic
b, Network size (followers, fans, members)
c, Quantity of commentary about brand or product

These are easily understandable common social metrics. However, with some C-level executives saying that they want to measure ROI from social media but don’t yet know the value of certain types of social media, there has to be more measurement and analysis. Monitoring data is only valuable if metrics relevant to a company are being tracked, analyzed, then applied to improving a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. 1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. 2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)
3. 3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.
4. 4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
5. 5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
6. 6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.
7. 7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.
8. 8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?
9. 9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?
10. 10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

You can see from the above list that there are both key metrics and variations that you’ll probably want to monitor and analyze, depending on your business objectives. Not all of them are simple metrics to track, and as such do require either or both custom tools and custom reports. Supplement your metrics reports by noting any milestones in your SMM plan. Also, if you run any sort of social campaigns, measure the ROI on specific goals. Social campaigns could use applications (E.g., Facebook applications like Mob the Rainbow) to encourage social participation. Measure application usage and resulting conversions. Finally, the use of complex measurements such as Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) can show both short- and long-term trends, thus providing you with an overall view of the health of your sites and social networks.

To, or to not get an MBA, that is the question?

Was chatting with a good friend of mine's son about whether to pursue an MBA or not and I asked what he wants to do. He claimed he wants to do a start-up and feels that an MBA would help him secure the financing. Interesting point though I told him understanding what your customer wants and knowing how to build it into a solid "buy-low/sell high, collect early/pay-late" business model that's scalable and deliver value has little to do with getting an MBA. Below is a paragraph from a thoughtful article by Vivek Wahhwa that recently appeared in TechCrunch.

"In my experience, the most successful entrepreneurs have been those with a strong technical background who have been through some sort of “finishing school”. (I am not talking about college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—I consider them to be outliers). Engineering degrees can be very technical and can actually narrow one’s horizons. To innovate, you need to understand customers and markets. To build a successful product—one that actually sells and makes an impact, you need to understand distribution and finance. So even in the lower echelons of technology, a broader educational background is a plus."

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/08/is-an-mba-a-plus-or-a-minus-in-the-startup-world/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#ixzz0nMMx6Rvi

Single Greatest Event in Human History: Christ's Resurrection.

Ever wonder about what was the single greatest event in the history of human existence? I found this list by Shane Ross titled Important Event in Human History an interesting way to succinctly view a time line of event but it got me thinking about which of these more than 500 items is the most important? In my opinion only part of it is listed here.

For me the single most important event in human history occurred in the spring of 30AD over the weekend following the Passover and is recorded by the physician "Luke" in that which he describes the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ .

Unlike all the other events listed by Shane Ross the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus Christ is the only event in human history that impacts every human that has ever existed. The events that weekend were God's ultimate expression of His love to us and through it we have forgiveness and eternal salvation for those who believe. The Gospel is truly unlike any religion in that its the "Good News" about what God already "did" for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Despite what all the world's various religion's say the Bible is quite clear that there is nothing any one who has ever lived can do to earn their salvation as it is a free gift from God that we celebrate on Easter. Mr Ross has compiled an impressive list but I know that the events of this weekend in 30AD are the most important in human history.